Brixton's anti-gentrification protest: identifying the problems is one thing, fixing them is another

The Reclaim Brixton demonstration expressed fears that the area’s character is being diluted and displaced. But the Foxtons estate agent is unlikely to go away, and the people it sells houses to won’t stop coming, argues Dave Hill

On paper, stopping gentrification is easy. At last Saturday’s Reclaim Brixton demonstration in south London, a list of solutions was written on three wide lengths of the stuff, taped to a wall in Windrush Square. Most focused on housing and the policies of local, Labour-run Lambeth Council: “Build more houses for working people”; “rent caps”; “Lambeth to stop evictions”; Lambeth to “prioritise repair of estates over ‘regeneration’”. Someone expressed the wish for a council scheme to protect small businesses deemed representative of “the community”. There was also an assertion, echoed throughout the day, that “Lambeth is not for sale”.

These missives expressed the views of specific local campaigns, but also illuminated the force fuelling anxieties about gentrification in many parts of the capital – the rising value of property and land and the rapid social changes this is driving.

In Brixton, as in other inner city areas that, by the standards of the capital, have historically been cheap to live in, soaring house prices and rents are making it unaffordable to those on incomes too high to entitle them to social housing, but too low to buy or rent privately. As a result, a new, more affluent sort have been moving in, while some of those born and raised there – and who would like to stay – are finding they have little choice but to move elsewhere. Many incomers too, are finding it harder to remain unless they’ve been able to buy.

Up the High Street from Windrush Square, just past Brixton Underground station on Atlantic Road, banners proclaimed a campaign to “save Brixton arches”. These are retail spaces nestling beneath the railway bridge, which, like the railway line itself, are owned by Network Rail. Together with the council they’re working on a scheme they call a “major investment” for central Brixton, which will see the refurbishment of the arches. But some fear what this might mean for local traders. A punning message above an independent fishmonger made this fear clear: “Triple the rents? You must be squidding!!”

Brixton-born Carolyne Hill has no quarrel with regenerating the area for the good, but is troubled by much of what’s currently going on. She and her friends carried placards: save our streets, save our spirit, save our soul. “You have family businesses that have been there for three generations,” she said. She’s unconvinced by Network Rail’s claims that it’s working with those businesses to ensure they have an opportunity to return. “They want to whitewash it,” she says. “They want to bring in, you know, Pret, Subway. It’s the cookie-cutter mould of gentrification.”

The Reclaim Brixton protesters reflected a particularly Brixtonian manifestation of London’s cultural and ethnic mix. Its Afro-Caribbean presence was prominent and resonantly political. Flags for a group called Brixton Black Revolutionaries were much in evidence, underlining the legacy of the Brixton Riots of 1981 and 1985, when long-standing tensions between black youths and the police exploded into violence and fire.

There was Latin American music and an international array of food. A theme of the day was the fear that Brixton’s kaleidoscopic character will be diluted and displaced, to be replaced by a sterile monoculture of well-heeled financiers and bland, corporate retail chains. In banners and speeches, a local history of resistance to larger powers was invoked and linked to wider political themes – austerity, “the cuts”, “the rich”. Later, there was an attempt by a few protesters to occupy the Town Hall and the window of the Foxtons estate agent, long seen as symbolic of “yuppie” colonisation, was smashed.

But Foxtons seems unlikely to go away, and the people they sell houses to won’t stop coming. These won’t all be those “rich foreign investors” routinely targeted by rhetoricians of the left. The rapid pace of gentrification in the past few years has heightened hostility to it, but the phenomenon itself is nothing new, including in Brixton itself.

It was there in the 1980s, even as the smoke of riot was in the air. The youthful editor at Another Quality Newspaper I wrote for at the time had a flat in the neighbourhood with his partner, who worked in advertising. A relative, employed in financial services but far from filthy rich, bought his first house on the fringes of Brixton years ago, a pleasant but unspectacular terraced dwelling of a type that would have cost too much in posher parts.

Meanwhile, north of the Thames, the excluding effect of gentrification has been strongly evident for decades; for as long, indeed, as the term has been in existence, coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe what was happening on her home turf of Islington. Fifty years ago, a middle-income couple could snap up a fine old Victorian three-bed in Highbury. Twenty-five years ago they couldn’t, but they could further east in rough old Hackney.

Today, the grown-up children of those Hackney incomers are scrabbling on to the bottom rung of that peculiarly British route to upward mobility, the “housing ladder”, in far-off Wanstead and beyond, bringing with them their bicycles, their Guardian values and taste for fancy coffee and organic veg. Their growing presence will slowly alter the nature of the places they arrive in, making them more expensive and middle class. And so those priced out by gentrification become gentrifiers themselves.

Controlling gentrification means facing and grappling with a range of tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas. Two years ago, Brixton novelist and playwright Alex Wheatle highlighted some of these in a short Guardian film. He’d been jailed for his part in the 1981 riots, but in 2008 was awarded an MBE for his services to literature. Wheatle was nostalgic for the days when Brixton Market pounded to the sound of reggae and most of the food on sale was Caribbean and cheap. Yet the evolved market scene also pleased him: “I must admit it’s nice to see a variety of people enjoying Brixton in a way I never thought imaginable when I was 17,” he said. “Brixton was a feared place to be, wasn’t it?”

You have family businesses that have been here for three generations. They want to whitewash it

‘You must be squidding’: a banner in Brixton Market. Photograph: Dave Hill

A thread of anti-gentrification sentiment has it that the ethnic make-up of Brixton is threatened, but perhaps its diversity could be greater than ever. Across Lambeth as a whole, which also contains Stockwell, Clapham and part of Vauxhall, the blend has increased in complexity this century as the most recent census findings show. Along with the usual array of trade unionists, left-wing fringe groups and anarchists, there was a Green Party stall at the demo. The Greens, with their boldly localist and development-sceptic stance, are strongest in the parts of London where gentrification is most conspicuous. They are, in that sense, a product of the things that they oppose.

And what of Lambeth council, target of so much of the demonstrators’ ire? There’s a limit to what a local authority can do about house price and private rent inflation in Brixton or anywhere else except, perhaps, to make an area’s schools, parks and streets more unpleasant so that fewer people want to live there. Windrush Square itself, named after the ship on which the first post-war West Indian immigrants arrived from Jamaica in 1948, is the sort of public realm enhancement that helps gentrification along.

Bill Parry of Unite, an organiser of the event, recognises the problems Lambeth faces with budget cuts. “This is about big politics and I don’t think an individual council can solve it,” he says. “But they must put themselves on the side of the people who elected them.” He’d like tougher campaigning against bad private landlords and, from Labour nationally, a bigger commitment to building more council housing than Ed Miliband has been willing to give.

Lambeth’s cabinet member for housing, Matthew Bennett, points to a programme for building 1,000 new council homes over the next four years to help residents on low incomes who will never be able to buy in Lambeth and can’t afford to rent privately either. Yet this itself is sparking opposition among those whose estates would have to be rebuilt in order to make space for extra homes on the basis that, like gentrification, it would break up a happy, mixed community. Elsewhere, Lambeth’s eviction from council properties of long-term, short-life housing co-op members has brought accusations of “social cleansing”. Bennett retorts that the sale of these has brought in £60m so far, some of which will go towards those 1,000 new council homes. Whose moral ground is the higher?

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Bennett also makes the valid point, as do politicians across the London spectrum, that many of those most likely to be squeezed out of Brixton by high price houses and rents are not among its very poorest residents. Though there are all kinds of pressures on the borough’s social housing stock as a whole, the 20,000 or so people living in secure council tenancies aren’t going anywhere unless they want to.

And, of course, some Brixtonians do choose to leave. Those who bought homes there back when prices were low can sell profitably now they are so staggeringly high, perhaps relocating gladly to the suburbs and beyond as Londoners have been doing for a century and more. They might even use the services of Foxtons. As for the problems caused by gentrification, naming them is one thing, fixing them is something else.